Abstract: This book is the first history in English of the Lutheran Church in Germany and Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning and ending in war, this period was of particular unease and upheaval for the Church. Attempts to emulate the spiritual community of the early Church, reform of the Church establishment and steps taken to enlighten parishioners were almost always held back by the anomalous structural legacy of the Reformation, tradition and parish habit, sacred and profane. The birth of the modern nation state and its market economy posed a fundamental challenge to the structure and ethos of the Reformation churches, as it did to the Catholic Church. The First World War deepened the crisis further.

Keywords: eighteenth century, Germany, Lutheran Church, market economy, nation state, nineteenth century, parish habit, profane, reformation legacy, sacred, Scandinavia, to enlighten, tradition, war